Episode materials: how an engineer learns to negotiate — Sergey Kiselev (Series #Leadership)

I’ve collected the materials from our conversation with Sergey Kiselev, Head of Development Platform at MWS Cloud Platform. Code of Leadership #83 aired on October 2, 2026. We discussed how to build a useful technical system that other teams will actually use: even a good tool needs to fit into their work.

Sergey’s background includes a student company in Irkutsk, Yandex, Yandex Cloud, and building the development platform for a new cloud. Along the way, he moved between engineering and management roles several times, taking his ability to organize people with him each time.

We discussed: 🔸 An engineer’s growth and a team’s autonomy How management experience helps when returning to code, and why Sergey sees a team that can work without his constant involvement as a manager’s achievement. 🔸 Building a platform through joint development Platform engineers joined product teams, helped write services, and used those tasks to test shared tools. Go, Kotlin, deployment, and a common API require agreements with people who often do not report to you. 🔸 Hiring as shared infrastructure Assignments, initial interviews, interviewer training, and an internal community. Sergey describes how a process that began in his team started helping neighboring departments. 🔸 What happens after service is restored Who tells users about the outage, and who returns to the tasks from the incident review? A promise to “be more careful” is of little help, while a documented fix can sit in the plans for months. 🔸 AI agents inside the platform Sergey describes access to documentation through MCP and turning team rules into agent instructions. Restrictions on sharing user data and questions about maintaining the code remain.

Episode materials 📌 Episode page 🎬 YouTube, VK Video 🎧 Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts 📝 Written summary

When developing an internal platform, what did you find harder: building the tool or agreeing on how it would be used?

#CodeOfLeadership #Leadership #Management #PlatformEngineering #DevOps #AI